Showing posts with label tile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tile. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Removing Paint from Tile
Man, I would love to do this to the presumably white, original to the house, from 1924 subway tile in my bathroom.
Hot vinegar and a cloth. Who knew? I wonder if it is worth trying.
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Hot vinegar and a cloth. Who knew? I wonder if it is worth trying.
Friday, May 6, 2011
backsplash
So what do you guys thing of this backsplash tile?
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I am kind of struggling about the whole backsplash thing, and so for now we have none. That's really fine, since it's not really super critical.
Originally, I was desperate for these tiles, but they don't really seem to go with the vibe the kitchen has now that things are installed.
My issue is that everything is very stately in the new kitchen and the squirrel tiles are pretty casual and rustic. I could go the white subway tile route, but I want to do that in the upstairs bath (which it currently has the original subway tile, painted over. Wonder if that's unpaintable.) So maybe the white Moroccan tile. I can't tell if it's unique and pretty or trendy and will be played in like six months. (Do people still say played? Or is played played? I can't tell! Help me interwebz!!!!!)
I like the skinny long glass tiles people are using now, but they seem kind of modern and we have a kind of traditional bent. I like the kind of luminosity of the glass, though, since the kitchen cabinets are so dark, maybe some extra light bouncing around could be nice.
Ah well, still undecided. In positive news, we are getting some progress on the deck. Right now the kitchen door opens onto a railing and a 10ish foot drop. Also, I am hoping to have some update pictures now of what's happening with the kitchen.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Granite!
I have been obsessing about my new kitchen for well over a year at this point. I have gone through a zillion different countertops that I thought I would use. Here they are, in the order I thought about them.
I also put a green background instead of the white so I could actually see it a little better. If you look at the other picture, you can see how they tried to put seams together, so that the pattern of the granite is mostly uninterrupted. I think the only place where it looks obviously different is near the sink on the left, but I think the pattern is small enough that it doesn't matter.
Here it is with the white background, looking suspiciously like the original marble I thought I might like. In a cruel twist of remodeling fate, it's likely to be installed the day I leave for a conference for work. I'm over it.
I told Jeff I thought the sink (included with the deal) looked kinda small. He told me "That is like FOURTEEN FEET of countertop. The sink is not small. )
He's probably right.
He usually is.
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- Carrera Marble. So pretty! But a friend looked at a house with marble counters and it turns out marble does not wear very well and requires a lot of maintenance. I'm super lazy. pass.
- Butcher Block. Also pretty! But again, maintenance. Plus, I had this idea that I would get white cabinets, and I ended up falling in love with Kraftmaid's Kaffe stain and I didn't like the combo.
- Quartz! Zodiaq has this color that looks kind of like the marble. Cool! It's not exact, but it's evocative of marble. Great.
- Different Quartz! Hold the phone. Blanco City Silestone looks pretty sweet next to my cabinets. This is prolly the way to go. Plus, it's cheaper than the Zodiaq. Cool. Wait, stop. You can't take hot things out of the oven and put it on quartz? How does that work? And why am I getting super expensive stone countertops that I can't put hot things on? I might as well just use...
- Ceramic tile. Which I had in the old house, and we could do cheaply and ourselves. Except it really isn't what I wanted at all and my husband told me he was NOT installing a ceramic tile counter. Fair enoug.
- Granite. I don't know how we didn't just start here, to be honest. Home Depot had a pretty killer sale, which resulted in us paying basically 25% less than we expected to spend. My original issue with granite is that I am too lazy to seal it. Home Depot claims theirs is already sealed and won't need to be resealed for 15 years. I can probably pull myself together to seal it when my kid goes to college. Sounds good.
It takes about a month, apparently, to get your granite ordered and installed. We had our space templated about two weeks ago, and they sent us these awesome pictures today. They appear to be actual pictures of the slab they are using! Totally cool! They give it to you so that you can approve where the seams are going to be cut.
Check it out. This is our slab and where they are going to be cutting it.
Look, here is a close up of the edge at the top. I wanted to convince myself that their picture was just oddly dark, so I messed around with the brightness and levels until it looked closer to what our sample looks like.
It also came with a a picture with all the parts laid out where they will go in the kitchen, which I also lightened.
I also put a green background instead of the white so I could actually see it a little better. If you look at the other picture, you can see how they tried to put seams together, so that the pattern of the granite is mostly uninterrupted. I think the only place where it looks obviously different is near the sink on the left, but I think the pattern is small enough that it doesn't matter.
I told Jeff I thought the sink (included with the deal) looked kinda small. He told me "That is like FOURTEEN FEET of countertop. The sink is not small. )
He's probably right.
He usually is.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Finishes
I think, at this point, that I have picked all the major finishes for the kitchen.We ordered cabinets (Kraftmaid, shaker style door, color: Kaffee in cherry), so that's definitely picked. While I was picking out the cabinets, I picked out a countertop (Silestone, in Blanco City).
Now that I think about it, although I knew the styles of things I wanted, I ended up kind of starting with the backsplash, which I am going to use this awesome tile from L'esperance Tile. It looks like squirrels and oak leaves and acorns! My front yard is covered with all three of these things. The tile are really cute, and the seller also makes field tile, so I should be able to do the backsplash in mostly the 'craftsmen glaze', white, peppered with squirrley oakey acorney tiles here and there. The white, incidentally, is not a pure shocking shiny appliance white. It's kind of natural white, I guess. In any case, it's really pretty and it goes really well with the countertops and cabinets.*
I kind of assumed I would paint the kitchen the same green as the rest of the house, which is a sort of light olive. It's called Bamboo Shoot (Valspar) but when I look at bamboo shoot on Valspar's website, it looks awful beige to me. Maybe they changed the color or something. But that's about the right color. I could also try to paint it turquoise, similar to the current kitchen color but a little deeper. The current kitchen's color is a little too baby blue for me.
Also, we are doing a ceramic or porcelain tile floor. We had one in the last kitchen we remodeled and it was basically indestructible and never looked dirty. That was pretty awesome. My husband thinks we can put one of those radiant mats underneath, so it will be heated. We did look at some natural stone (slate, mostly) in a store for the floor, but neither of us really liked the texture. It's kind of .... chippy? Something.
*Incidentally, the L'esperance tile person on Etsy has been really fantastic, and sent me some sample color and sizes of tile. Etsy is so full of awesome people.
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